Dorian Jose Braun __ ‘Easy visions’, 2015

‘Easy visions’ is a film investigating on a particular form of oral history: a collectively generated myth.

This myth’s composition differs from the typical story structure of a history. Traditionally stories are the re-telling of a singular event passed on through generations. This documentary’s narrative is collectively told through multiple perspectives of several inter- viewees who Dorian encounte- red and filmed in El Bruc. The people speak of their personal observation of an unusual and often unexplainable light, which appears above Mount Serrat, near el Bruc, Spain; tales of this apparent local phenomena date as far back as the 8th century.

The film is inspired by ideas that come from a native Brazilian tribe who live in the Amazon. The Pirahã people do not have the language to describe the future nor the past. Therefore, for them, only what they perceive in the present exists.

The Pirahã are an indigenous people numbering approximately 700, living along the banks of the Maici River in the jungle of northwest Brazil.

The Pirahã tribe has no collective memory and no original creation myths. Committed to an exis- tence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think nor speak in abstractions – and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers or myths. The word ‘xibipío’ is a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience, which the anthropologist Daniel Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. Everett says, “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but ‘xibipío’: ‘gone
out of experience’. They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience’.”

Dorian Jose Braun

Dorian Jose Braun graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 2013. He was awarded the John Kinross Scholarship, and a Graduate Residency at Hospital- field and currently lives and works in Glasgow and Ullapool. Recently his interdisciplinary practice has enquired into the history of sound, through audio and video works and self-made instruments. Braun works collaboratively, each production developed with the specialist knowledge of his collaborative partners. He lived here at the residency during the month of September 2015, when was produced the piece ‘Easy Visions’.

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